Monthly Archives: September 2011

“Dr. K All the Way…” & Other Fall Classics

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

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Dwight Gooden, aka, "Dr. K," Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

While the country waits to see whether Congress and the President will find a way to entertain us with political gridlock and endless compromises and capitulation, I realized this week that I have a twenty-fifth anniversary this month. It’s been a bit more than a quarter century since my New York Mets won the NL East division title (their first since ’73), one more brick in their World Series wall that year.

Those not-so-Amazing Mets were a juggernaut that year, having won 108 games and run away with the division lead by the end of June. Gooden was Dr. K., and, along with Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Bob Ojeda, and Jesse Orozco, led the pitching staff. While Darryl Strawberry was the straw that stirred the drink on offense, along with Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, Howard Jones and Keith Hernandez. God, I really loved that team!

Darryl Strawberry home run, Shea Stadium, July 2, 1988. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan).

I really did. I imbued the Mets with all of my hopes and dreams, and saw their wins as a way to see myself as a winner. And whenever they lost a game or a series, I saw myself as having lost as well. I was aware of all of this on some level, that making my life circumstances a parallel story to that of a major league baseball team was, well, a bit childish.

But given my life since the age of eleven, I needed that outlet, that room to be a child, if only for two or three hours a day. In between watching my four younger siblings, washing clothes at the laundromat in Pelham, dealing with my alcohol father and my idiot stepfather, running back and forth to the store, applying to colleges, and facing the hell that was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. Especially with three AP courses, a touch of senioritis, and a number of classmates at each other’s throats. Including my own.

As the season took forever to wind down (the Mets clinched the NL East division on September 17, more than two weeks before the end of the season), the pre-WFAN station for the Mets (WHN-AM, a country oldies station until the 24-hour group took it over in ’87 and renamed it WFAN) started playing their World Series-or-bust promo, “Dr. K All the Way! — Let’s Go Mets!” So silly, so goofy, so geared toward long-suffering Mets fans. “Is that the best you can do?,” I thought every time I heard the ten-second spot. Apparently it was, and it didn’t matter either way, because fans are usually too fanatic to sweat the goofy stuff.

I became even more involved in rooting for my team as they moved into the playoffs. I’d listen to games in class, between classes, even in between questions, it seemed, in my AP Physics class. To say the least, my grades suffered, and more than a few of my non-Mets-fan classmates berated me in the process. But how could I explain to them the psychic bond I felt to this team? A feeling that somehow, if they, the downtrodden Mets, could pull off the ultimate victory and win a World Series, that I, a nobody, could make my life a victorious one as well. My more affluent and too-busy-being-cool classmates wouldn’t have understood that. As it was, I barely understood it myself.

Fast-forward twenty-five years. I’m no longer a baseball fan, and have no intent to fall back in love with a game I find boring, and with an institution that represents culture and race in America that is so pre-Civil Rights Movement and twentieth century. Most of my Mets still have their rings, even if key players on that team have been or are in prison, recovering drug addicts, and have made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars speculating in the snuff and stock markets (see Lenny Dykstra ’09 HBO Real Sports interview excerpt via The Young Turks).

But I still have that child-like sense of hope and yearning. I just don’t place it in anonymous others anymore. I haven’t lived or died with a team since my Knicks came within a missed 3-pointer by John Starks of winning the ’94 NBA Finals in Game Six. But I do place it in myself, because between God and me, and the others I’ve met and befriended in my life, I’ve been able to move mountains.

Which is why it does and doesn’t matter if the job stimulus passes in whole, in part or even not at all. I need to take that same optimism, that same hope, convert it to more hard work, and find a way to infuse it in my son, so that he can run the race, even if and when I can’t. In the process, I hope he find heroes he can look up to in the fall, even if they are fleeting ones.

Many Thanks

27 Tuesday Sep 2011

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Just a quick note to thank all of you — regular readers, random readers and readers somewhere in between — for continuing to read and support my blog. Because of you, my relatively new blog site has passed 1,000 visitors a month for the first time in the eighteen months since I moved from Blogger.com at the end of March ’10. Thanks so much for your support and comments and agreeing to disagree, whether you’ve liked what I’ve had to say or not. I will try to continue to earn your support of this important platform for my work as a writer, educator, and all-around troublemaker.

Me at son's 7th birthday party, July 30, 2010. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

Education, A Numbers Game Love Story

22 Thursday Sep 2011

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Craps dice, like the state of education reform via numbers crunching these days, August 6, 2006. (Source/Roland Scheicher via Wikipedia). In public domain.

This could just as easily be titled, “Why your multivariate regression analysis isn’t better than my chi-square test,” because that is the state of mainstream education research these days. I find it stifling, like being wrapped in Saran Wrap covered by a condom lined in sheep’s intestines.

Numbers have their place, but the field’s obsession with crunching numbers for trends that defy quantification has increased as a result of federal mandates like NCLB and philanthropy’s accountability movement over the past fifteen years. What’s the long-term impact of the thousands of studies and the deployment of thousands of psychometricians and research analysts in P-20 education reform (that’s early childhood education, K-12, undergraduate and graduate education combined)? Not much, because our politicians and philanthropists are staking themselves to trends almost regardless of numbers.

It all started for me about this time twenty years ago. I did an independent study with Bruce Anthony Jones,

Linear regression graph with over 200 data points, February 22, 2009. (Source/Michael Hardy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

then an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education’s ed policy and administration department. In that one semester, I quickly learned that folks in the education field defined research in only two ways: quantitative and qualitative. And by qualitative, they meant soft research, like Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream. What I didn’t know was that many in the field were working to make the qualitative — surveys, focus groups, oral interviews/transcripts — quantifiable.

Today, everything that can be tracked in American education usually has a number attached to it. It’s hardly grades and standardized test scores anymore. Homework hours, time to task on lesson plans to work on a single problem that may be part of a high-stakes state exam, teacher effectiveness, suspensions and disciplinary reports disaggregated by race and gender. It drives me nuts, and I’ve used SAS and SPSS before, during my grad school days. I can only imagine how a teacher who just wants their students to learn and do well must feel about this numbers game.

But if education has become a number game, it most resembles the game of craps. Take the issue of teacher

Michelle Rhee, former DCPS Chancellor, one of many who've taken advantage of education as craps game, Washington, DC, February 19, 2008. (Source/US Department of Labor). In public domain.

effectiveness, often tied to state-mandates around test scores and students meeting or exceeding a percentile at a given school on these tests. Let’s say if a school as a whole actually exceeds the proficiency percentile. They may well receive more money, and teachers may well get a bonus (depending on the state and school district and union contracts, which by the way, may also be part of a statistical formula). None of this actually proves that these students are better prepared for, say, thinking independently or critically, because critical reasoning isn’t tested by most of the high-stakes state tests.

Nor can they show the writing skills necessary for student success later on in their education, as most of these tests don’t test writing comprehension skills either. Most importantly, where does teacher effectiveness come in as a factor? Do we have to account for time to task in comparison to each exam item, like a psychometrician at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) would? Do we factor out home studying/ homework time, parents’ education, income and race, or whether they eat a hearty breakfast the morning of the exam? Or do we continue to simply say, if Teacher X gets Class A to raise its state test score by 25 percent, they get a raise and a pat on the head? Really?

What’s more, whether teacher effectiveness, student success, or free and reduced lunch programs, politicians, parents and pundits hardly look at any numbers beyond any report’s executive summary. We all insist that our school and community colleges and universities get better at graduating students ready for the real world of work. Fine. Then we insist on lower taxes, blaming teachers, destroying unions, complaining about the state of things but not doing anything to make education work for all of our students. Not fine.

It doesn’t take a two-year study from The Education Trust to realize that there’s no one-to-one correlation

Taco Bell's Gordita Supreme, September 22, 2011. (Source/TacoBell.com).

between an effective teacher and higher student test scores. Or a report from the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education to know that a lunch of murder burgers and suicide fries with ketchup as a vegetable is about as nutritious as a Taco Bell gordita. School districts and many a college have gone without even adequate resources for years. But instead of providing them, we make them kneel in begging for them, and yet expect them to perform Lazarus-type miracles in the process.

We waste time with numbers and spend little time on causes and solutions that make sense in education. I think about that weak +0.4 correlation number that ETS has put out for years regarding the SAT. It’s the likelihood of someone who does well on the exam beginning their freshman year in college with a 3.0 GPA. I scored an 1120 on the SAT in October ’86, not exactly the greatest score. But I did manage a 3.02 average my first year (and a 2.63 my first semester, by the way), and still came within a few days of dropping out because I was homeless at the beginning of my sophomore year.

I dare say the numbers crunchers at ETS didn’t factor that in their multivariate analysis. Or my homesickness or obsession with a former high school crush. Mark Twain is right about statistics — they can “a good walk spoiled (or lies, I think).”

The Audacity of Low Expectations/Jealousy

19 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Work, Youth

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Mimi and Eunice, “Low Expectations,” September 19, 2011. (Source/http://mimiandeunice.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because of image’s low resolution and without the intent to reproduce or distribute for profit.

It seems to me that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past three decades overcoming other people’s psychological issues. Regarding race, race and gender, race, gender and class, not to mention performance issues, success, jealousy and envy, and other psychoses that had little or nothing to do with me. It’s something that most folks who aren’t Black, male, grew up in poverty and had some success (however one defines that) really can’t understand unless they have parents who’ve told them every single day that they “weren’t good enough to live.”

Still, these issues have mostly cropped up for me when I’ve experienced what most people would recognize as success, as if the only role I was ever supposed to play in life was that of a doormat. The first time I went through this process of blowing up other people’s low expectations of me was at the beginning of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, about this time twenty-five years ago. A couple of weeks into the school year, MVHS released our class rankings. Out of the 545 or so students eligible to graduate as part of the Class of ’87, I was ranked fourteenth with a 3.83 average.

My MVHS trascript, courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Admissions Office, January 7, 1987. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Note the circles from the admissions officer all over the transcript.

I understood that this was pretty good, but I was also disappointed that I hadn’t cracked the top ten. In fact, the top twelve students in our class all had GPAs above a 4.0, all because of our weighted Level 0 and Level 1 courses. Crush #1 finished just ahead of me, thirteenth in our rankings, something I saw as ironic. Despite this sign of academic success, I hoped and wished for more, and spent several late-night walks over the next few weeks second-guessing my work in tenth grade.

My classmates started to show their darker sides, some for the first time since the days of 7S. One came up to me after my AP Calculus class soon after the rankings were posted. “The only reason you’re in the top twenty’s because of history!,” implying that I was an average student in all of my other subjects. Another, much shorter and much more condescending classmate chimed in a few days later, saying that “the only thing you can do with history is play Jeopardy.” I wasn’t exactly walking around school celebrating my good fortune. I chalked it up to the stress of years of academic competition, the boiling over of senioritis and the rage associated with college preparations. The possibility that jealousy was involved didn’t cross my mind until much later. I didn’t think that anyone could be envious of my standing.

Fast-forward four years to the fall of ’90, as I prepared in earnest for grad school. Not only had I endured a short conversation at the beginning of that year with the great Sylvia Fasulo and her attempts to discourage me from pursuing grad school, law school or a career in law (see my “The Legend of Sylvia Fasulo” from September ’09). I had two professors from Pitt who told me that they weren’t sure about my chances for getting into grad school, and Reid Andrews, who flat-out told me that he didn’t think that I was “graduate school material.”

I have no doubt that if these yahoos were jealous of me at all, it was because of my age, and not my potential. They simply didn’t see how a 3.4 GPA and a 3.82 in my history major would be good enough to get me into a master’s — much less a doctoral — program. The fact that I completed my master’s degree in two semesters within twenty months of essentially being told that I was a fool left Andrews, at least, at a loss for words.

There are so many other instances in which a grad student, a professor, a supervisor, even my siblings, have expressed their low expectations and jealousy over my tiny little crumbs of success that it has left my head spinning on a broom handle. I mean, what did I really do to earn or deserve that kind of attention? I don’t own a house or have a million dollars in gold lying around. I have yet to publish an article in Rolling Stone or in The Atlantic Monthly. I don’t exactly have LeBron James or President Obama on speed dial.

So what is it about me, I’ve asked myself so many times? And then, I’ve reminded myself of something I figured out about twenty-one years ago. That the only expectations that I ultimately need to meet or exceed are my own. That what other people say about me, no matter how distasteful, really doesn’t matter, for those folks were never going to be there for me anyway.

Maybe it’s my refusal to live under someone else’s low expectations, to not allowing myself the luxury of envy, that irks those around me. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s as simple as misery loving company, and not loving mine. Either way, it’s ironic that we live in a time in which we prefer to tear each other down rather than help each other get going in our lives. Which makes my relationship with the rest of humanity so bittersweet. I guess I really am a writer!

American Denial & Fear, Courtesy of Family Feud

10 Saturday Sep 2011

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The Culture of Fear cover (audio edition), September 10, 2011. (Source/http://betterworldbooks.com).

It’s been a decade since the largest American tragedy since World War II in 9/11 in New York, Washington, DC and central Pennsylvania. And we’ve spent much of the past week in remembrance of this event, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as a society since that tragic Tuesday. Cutting through all of the chatter and bullcrap in the run-up to 9/11 the last few weeks has been a part-time job, especially since most of it is wrapped in one of our nation’s best-selling products — fear.

Second plane, Twin Towers, 9/11, 9:03 am, courtesy of Today Show. (Source/http://en.wikipedia.org).

But a few things are clear. One is that we as a nation have spent the past ten years in constant fear, as if the Cold War wasn’t enough for anyone born before ’74. We wasted trillions of dollars on wars that have done more harm than good for us at home and abroad, ruining the economy, shredding the social welfare state and leaving us with curtailed civil liberties. Most of all, we’ve left ourselves in constant denial of our own fear, xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, making America look even more imperialistic — if that seemed at all possible in ’01 — then we did a decade ago.

Of all the half-truths and total lies we’ve been told — and told ourselves — over the past ten years is how “the nation came together” in the first few months after the attacks. Really? In a parallel universe, maybe. I had the unfortunate experience of riding a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Washington, DC two days after the attacks. My one-day business trip became three days, with flights suspended, rental cars gone and trains booked ten days out. Two guys, one White, one Black, “came together” on the back of the bus to insult and threaten a Sikh, all because he had the nerve to wear a turban. I had to get between the two dumb asses and the poor Sikh man to tell them that he wasn’t Arab or Muslim. “What difference does it make,” one of the dumb asses said, implying that I didn’t love America because I wasn’t ready to kill the “m-fs,” as he put it.

We came together, alright. To persecute Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians and anyone else

They Hate Us For Our Freedom (2008), Claire Fontaine, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, December 11, 2008. (Source/http://language.cont3xt.net).

who looked like a potential terrorist. Even now, people like Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh can agree that because some Arab Muslims are terrorists, that we should suspect the millions here in the US and the half a billion in the Middle East. This makes the Red Scare look like a high school lunchroom fight by comparison.

This is why the reference to Family Feud reference is so appropriate, especially with good-old Brit Richard “Dickie” Dawson as the host from ’76 to ’85. It was a show full of not-so-learned people giving rather folksy answers to questions big and small. I loved the part where one family would get together after a first or second strike, and someone would come up with an answer everyone in the group sounded like it was correct. Then they’d start clapping and yelling, “Good answer! Good answer!” before the buzzer would sound and the audience would say, “Uhhhhhhhh!”

That, and the hillbilly theme music for the show, and Dawson prancing around the set while kissing all of the female contestants, allegedly to wish them luck, were all things I enjoyed about Family Feud. The ’70s were so grand!

So in the spirit of Family Feud, I’ve spliced myself as various characters into an episode from ’81. The topic is about naming the people to blame for our current American mess, at home and abroad. I hope that it’s funny and goofy.

But I also hope that it’s food for thought. For in the end, we are all to blame. For being so entitled and privileged, for worshiping the US dollar and the people who have billions of them. For refusing to believe that America, as great a country as it is, screws up on the international stage, that our politicians have put our nation in a precarious position militarily and economically. For being so willing to buy the idea that the Rapture is upon us, but not the idea that climate change is real and that we can do something about it. For acting as if ours is a Christian nation, despite the fact that Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and yes, Muslims were all part of America’s founding.

I hope that we can somehow find a way to outgrow our petty, stupid, idiotic differences around race, religion and politics and put down the class and corporate warfare against the average person. But our lust for wealth and constant feuding may be too much to overcome. Did those twenty Saudi terrorists win after all? Only if we let denial and fear — and those in power who rely on us voting out of both — lead us over a cliff.

Humanities: First Contact, Full Circle

09 Friday Sep 2011

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Creme Anglaise in a pitcher next to a ladle, the closest thing I could find to represent my foodie image of "creme de la creme," the mantra of Humanities administrators during my six years of travails, September 9, 2011. (Source/http://recipetips.com).

It’s been thirty years exactly since I made the most horrible set of first impressions in my forty-one years of life. My first day of seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon, New York was also my first day in the Humanities Program, a magnet program for the gifted track (and also the way the powers that were decided to desegregate the school district in ’76).

But it was so much more than that, for better and certainly for worse, at least for me. It was the flip side of a coin that represented the worst six years of my life (the coin’s other side being my life at 616 with what can only be loosely called my family). But it was also the six years of my life that made the past three decades of success, struggle, more success, and more struggles possible.

After putting together Boy @ The Window — in which a large measure of text was devoted to what occurred with and around me during my time in Humanities, one question still remains. Did my time in Humanities, with my classmates, teachers, counselors and principals have to be as difficult as they were — and not just for me? There’s no real way to answer that question, because “of course” is a cold and callous answer, while “of course not” belies the important psychological changes that made me a better thinker, student, writer and person as a result. But if I could, I’d build a time machine, jump into my eleven-year-old version of myself, and make sure to have my dumb ass take my kufi off for my first day of school in 7S. At least then, I would’ve been normal-weird, instead of standoff-ish weird.

My main problem, though, was that I arrogantly believed I was the smartest person in the world. I paid dearly for having that kind of naiveté, to the point where certain classmates still see me as that idiotic preteen, and refuse to see me any other kind of way. Too bad for them, for I know I’ve long since changed.

That day, at least for the past decade, has also reminded me of another beautifully warm, powder-blue sky day that turned tragic. With two days before we reach ten years since 9/11, I think about the way I used to be, and see so many similarities to how we see ourselves as a nation. “We’re #1,” we love to say, even though we’ve long since stopped being #1 in so many respects. We have the largest economy and military, the largest debt, make the largest contribution to climate change and pollution, and complain the most about how the rest of the world isn’t like us.

Like me three decades ago, America is naive and arrogant. And unfortunately, it faces competitors — some as unfeeling as my more entitled or more unscrupulous classmates — who are clobbering us in education, economic growth, health care, social welfare, even in protecting their citizens and their citizen’s freedoms. It’s sad, because there are millions of people now experiencing the severe fall into poverty — and all of the pressures that places on marriages, parenting and children — that I faced, very unsuccessfully at first, thirty years ago.

I’ve come full circle. Between the struggle to find a home for Boy @ The Window and my struggle to continue to do meaningful work as a writer and educator, I find that even on my worst days, my best days thirty years ago were a thousand times worse.  My first contact with academic competition, Whiteness and diversity, racial strife, religious differences and straight-up elitism is what has given me a greater appreciation for who I’ve become since that sunny day so many years ago. As well as how much I’ve gained.

A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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Boyz N The Hood (1991) Screen Shot, September 1, 2011. (Source/http://freeinfosociety.com). 20 years since this movie, and we still inquisition Black males about their masculinity. By the way, I was NEVER this cool growing up.

About this time a quarter-century ago, I received regular reminders from the people in my life as family and classmates that I didn’t fit their definition of how a heterosexual Black male should behave. At least in Mount Vernon, New York. You see, I didn’t have to be a young Barack Obama or Lenny Kravitz to learn at an early age that I wasn’t Black enough, man enough or heterosexual enough for many folks in my life. The fact that I didn’t run around with the other boys skipping school and sniffing skirts was evidence enough of how different I was.

One of the more subtle forms of interrogation I experienced occurred at the end of eleventh grade, going into the summer of ’86. That day I walked into English class, and Crush #2 asked me about that song of the day, which happened to be Level 42’s “Something About You” Something About You. When I told her who it was, she started snapping her fingers to it. LJ, an on-and-off again classmate since third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, walked by as we were talked. “Are they Black?,” she asked. When I said “No,” LJ shook her head and walked away. The group was White and from the Isle of Wight, no less, a bunch of off-shore British White guys. Somehow I’d violated some kind of code in LJ’s eyes. It was the last conversation we had before we graduated a year later.

South 10th Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York, November 19, 2006. (Source/http://weichert.com). The egg-shell white house in the center of the photo is where my father Jimme lived in ’86, an attic room. Looks better now than it did then.

I received a far less subtle hint that made LJ’s disgust look like romance by comparison. It was an incident just a week before the start of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, something I’ve posted about before. By the time I’d gotten a crush on Crush #2, my sexuality was no longer in question, although I’d never seriously questioned it before. My father, though, still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer of ’86, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I found Jimme that last Saturday morning in August, hanging out on the street around the corner from his place, having already drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking and stumbling down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house in which he rented a room. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again.  (see my “In the Closet, On the Down Low” from June 1, 2009 for the full conversation and incident)

As I saw it then, I was a year away from college, and I was still in the streets dealing with my drunk ass father, my jealous and institutionalized older brother, a sham of a marriage at 616 and four younger siblings who were high on sugar all of the time. I’d done so much to change my life and yet almost everything in my life was the same. Up to this point the only things that had kept my head from exploding were God and school. As my senior year approached, I wondered how much longer I could maintain emotional control before I finally just lost myself in years of growing pain, like a volcano about to super-erupt.

As I see it now, it remains a shame that we as Black males have to run a gauntlet in our communities in order

A Question of Freedom (2009) Hardcover Cover, September 1, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

to become Black men, at least in the eyes of others. We can talk about the K-12-to-prison system that is public education in many a community of color. Or the drug trade. Or the sheer lack of quality public services and interventions in our communities or lives, other than police forces. Or even the daily images that tell so many of us that aspiring to be a rapper, football or basketball player, or just to be cool is so much better than knowing anything. The latest good memoir on this is R. Dwayne Betts‘ A Question of Freedom (2009).

But we must also admit that the people who attempted to raise us — our families, relatives, neighbors and classmates — are just as often at fault for turning out Black males who aren’t ready to be Black men, human adult males with ideas and aspirations outside of the box. Until we get serious about the fact that those closest to us have put such idiotic notions of masculinity, heterosexuality and Black coolness in many a Black male’s head, we get nowhere in helping to transform the lives of people like me when I was a teenager.

For we can’t depend on people like me becoming homeless, embracing solitude, and leaving my community as the best way to learn how to be a man, an adult, a really serious yet compassionate (and goofy) human being.